Sarah Waters

Her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, won a 1999 Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday / John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. She was inspired to write it while working on her PhD thesis on lesbian historical fiction that underlined the inadequacies and potential of the contemporary lesbian historical genre. As part of her research, she read a fair amount of nineteenth-century pornography and dictionaries of slang and vulgar words: 'tipping the velvet' is Victorian slang for cunnilingus.

Her third novel, Fingersmith, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize 2002 and for the Man Booker Prize 2002. It won the CWA Historical Dagger prize for historical crime fiction and was picked more than any other novel as a Book of the Year 2002.

Sarah Waters was for a time an associate lecturer for the Open University and has also tutored on Creative Writing programmes, but is now a full-time fiction writer living in London. In 2003 she was nominated by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'.

Her latest novel, The Little Stranger (2009), is set in a crumbling country house in rural Warwickshire, and has more than a hint of the supernatural.

Fact file

Name: Sarah Waters

Education: BA Canterbury University; MA Lancaster University, PhD Queen Mary, University of London

Date of birth: 1966

Place of birth: Neyland, Pembrokeshire

Current home: South London

Awards: Times Novelist of the Year (2000); Affinity, American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Book Award (2001).